Claude Jacques Berge (5 June 1926 – 30 June 2002) was a French mathematician, recognized as one of the modern founders of combinatorics and graph theory. Biography and professional history Claude Berge's parents were André Berge and Geneviève Fourcade. André Berge (1902–1995) was a physician and psychoanalyst who, in addition to his professional work, had published several novels. He was the son of the René Berge, a mining engineer, and Antoinette Faure. Félix François Faure (1841–1899) was Antoinette Faure's father; he was President of France from 1895 to 1899. André Berge married Geneviève in 1924, and Claude was the second of their six children. His five siblings were Nicole (the eldest), Antoine, Philippe, Edith, and Patrick. Claude attended the near Verneuil-sur-Avre, about west of Paris. This famous private school, founded by the sociologist Edmond Demolins in 1899, attracted students from all over France to its innovative educational program. At this stage in his life, Claude was unsure about the topic in which he should specialize. He said in later life: "I wasn't quite sure that I wanted to do mathematics. There was often a greater urge to study literature." His love of literature and other non-mathematical subjects never left him and we shall discuss below how they played a large role in his life. However, he decided to study mathematics at the University of Paris. After the award of his first degree, he continued to undertake research for his doctorate, advised by André Lichnerowicz. He began publishing mathematics papers in 1950. In that year two of his papers appeared, the short paper Sur l'isovalence et la régularité des transformateurs and the major, 30-page paper Sur un nouveau calcul symbolique et ses applications. The symbolic calculus which he discussed in this major paper is a combination of generating functions and Laplace transforms. He then applied this symbolic calculus to combinatorial analysis, Bernoulli numbers, difference equations, differential equations, and summability factors. In 1951 he published a further two short papers, Sur l'inversion des transformateurs and Sur une théorie ensembliste des jeux alternatifs, that announced various results that would be discussed fully in his thesis. He was awarded a doctorate in 1953 for his thesis Sur une théorie ensembliste des jeux alternatifs, under the supervision of André Lichnerowicz. In this thesis, he examined games where perfect information is available in which, at each move, there are possibly an infinite number of choices. The